27D. McKenzie et al. (eds.), The Landscape Ecology of Fire,
Ecological Studies 213, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0301-8_2, © Springer
Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
2.1 Introduction
Use of scaling terminology and concepts in ecology evolved rapidly
from rare occurrences in the early 1980s to a central idea by the
early 1990s (Allen and Hoekstra 1992; Levin 1992; Peterson and
Parker 1998). In landscape ecology, use of “scale” frequently
connotes explicitly spatial considerations (Dungan et al. 2002),
notably grain and extent. More generally though, scaling refers to
the sys- tematic change of some biological variable with time,
space, mass, or energy. Schneider (2001) further specifies
ecological scaling sensu Calder (1983) and Peters (1983) as “the
use of power laws that scale a variable (e.g., respiration) to body
size, usually according to a nonintegral exponent” while noting
that this is one of many equally common technical definitions. He
further notes that “the concept of scale is evolving from verbal
expression to quantitative expression” (p. 545), and will continue
to do so as mathematical theory matures along with quantitative
methods for extrapolating across scales. In what follows, we
operate mainly with this quoted definition, noting that other
variables can replace “body size”, but we also use such expressions
as “small scales” and “large scales” somewhat loosely where we
expect confusion to be minimal. We examine the idea of contagious
dis- turbance, how it influences our cross-scale understanding of
landscape processes, leading to explicit quantitative relationships
we call scaling laws. We look at four types of scaling laws in fire
regimes and present a detailed example of one type, associated with
correlated spatial patterns of fire occurrence. We conclude
briefly
D. McKenzie (*) Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory, Pacific
Northwest Research Station, U.S. Forest Service, 400 N 34th St,
Ste. 201, Seattle, WA 98103-8600, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
Chapter 2 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
Donald McKenzie and Maureen C. Kennedy
28 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
with thoughts on the implications of scaling laws in fire regimes
for ecological processes and landscape memory.
Landscape ecology differs from ecosystem, community, and population
ecology in that it must always be spatially explicit (Allen and
Hoekstra 1992), thereby coupling scaling analysis with spatial
metrics. For example, characteristic scales of analysis such as the
stand, watershed, landscape, and region are associated with both
dimensional spatial quantities (e.g., perimeter, area, elevational
range) and dimen- sionless ones (e.g., perimeter/area ratio,
fractal dimension). Similarly, properties of landscapes such as
patch size distributions are also associated with spatial metrics.
The tangible physical dimensions of landscapes obviate the often
circuitous methods required to define and quantify scales in
communities or ecosystems.
2.2 Scale and Contagious Disturbance
A contagious disturbance is one that spreads across a landscape
over time, and whose intensity depends explicitly on interactions
with the landscape (Peterson 2002). Some natural hazards (Cello and
Malamud 2006), such as wildfires, are therefore contagious, whereas
others, such as hurricanes, are not, even though their propagation
may still produce distinctive spatial patterns. By the same
criterion, biotic processes can be contagious (e.g., disease
epidemics, insect outbreaks, grazing) or not (e.g., clearcutting).
Contagion has two components: momentum (also see energy, Chap. 1)
and connectivity. Together they create the aforementioned
interaction between process and landscape. For an infec- tious
disease—the best-known contagious process—a sneeze can provide
momentum, while the density of nearby people provides connectivity.
For fire, momentum is provided by fire weather via its effects on
fireline intensity and heat transfer, whereas connectivity is
provided by the spatial pattern and abun- dance of fuels.
Momentum and connectivity covary in a contagious disturbance
process such as fire. Increases in momentum generally increase
connectivity, and changes in con- nectivity can be abrupt when the
number of patches susceptible to fire reaches a percolation
threshold (Stauffer and Aharony 1994; Loehle 2004). For example,
Gwozdz and McKenzie (unpublished data) found that decreasing
humidity across a mountain watershed (momentum provided by fire
weather) can abruptly change the connectivity of fuels when the
percentage of the landscape susceptible to fire spread crosses a
percolation threshold.
Interactions between momentum and connectivity may appear to be
scale- dependent in that they yield qualitative changes in the
behavior of landscape distur- bances when viewed at different
scales, even though the mechanisms of contagion per se do not
change across scales. For example, the physical mechanisms of heat
transfer remain the same across scales, and fire spread does depend
on local connectivity of fuels, but estimates of connectivity
across landscapes are sensitive to spatial resolution (Parody and
Milne 2004).
292 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
2.3 Extrapolating Across Scales
Much study has gone into understanding how spatial processes change
across scales (Levin 1992; Wu 1999; Miller et al. 2004; Habeeb et
al. 2005). Scale extrap- olation is universally seen to be
obligatory, because detailed measurements are often only available
at fine spatial scales (McKenzie et al. 1996), but also difficult.
Given a set of observations at coarse scales, however, it is
important to understand the distinction between average behavior of
fine-scale processes and the emergent behavior (Milne 1998; Levin
2005) of a system. Emergent behavior “appears when a number of
simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more
com- plex behaviors as a collective”.1 In the first case, the
principal difficulty in extrapo- lation is error propagation,
producing biased estimates of the average or expected behavior at
broad scales because of the cumulative error from summing or
averag- ing many calculations (Rastetter et al. 1992; McKenzie et
al. 1996). In the second case, the difficulty is more profound, in
that one must identify scales in space and time at which
qualitative changes in behavior occur.
Some qualitative models can partition scale axes in tractable ways.
For example, Simard (1991) developed a classification of processes
associated with wildland fire and its management that spanned many
orders of magnitude on space and time axes. This “taxonomy” of
wildland fire, though not derived quantitatively from data, was
enough to build a logical connection to the National Fire Danger
Rating System (NFDRS––Cohen and Deeming 1985) that was of practical
use (Simard 1991). Nevertheless, the limitations of such models are
clear, in that qualitative changes in system behavior and key
variables are established a priori. In order to relate processes
quantitatively across scales, whether one is interested in average
behavior or emergent behavior, a tractable theoretical framework is
needed.
Scaling laws are quantitative relationships between or among
variables, with one axis (usually X) often being either space or
time. Many scaling laws are bivariate and linear or log-linear, and
are developed from statistical models, theoretical mod- els, or
both. Most commonly they are based on frequency distributions or
cumula- tive distributions wherein variables, objects, or events
with smaller values occur more frequently than those with larger
values. The simplest scaling law is a power law, for which a
histogram in log-log space of the frequency distribution follows a
straight line (Zipf 1949, as cited in Newman 2005). Following
Newman (2005), let p(x) dx be the proportion of a variable with
values between x and dx. For histo- grams that are straight lines
in log-log space, ln p(x) = –a ln x + c, where a and c are
constants (Newman 2005). Exponentiating both sides and defining C =
exp(c), we have the standard power law formulation
( )p x Cx a−= (2.1)
1 Wikipedia contributors, “Emergence,” Wikipedia, the Free
Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Emergence. Accessed 25
Jan 2010.
30 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
The parameter of interest is the slope a (always negative for
frequency distributions), whereas C serves as a normalization
constant such that p(x) sums to 1 (Newman 2005). In the case of a
frequency distribution, where Y values in a histogram are counts, C
can be rescaled in order to compare slopes among distri- butions.
Power-law relationships are often fit statistically by various
binning methods, with subsequent regression of bin averages on
event size, but more complicated maximum-likelihood methods may be
more robust (White et al. 2008; Chap. 3).
Newman (2005) gives 12 examples of quantities in natural,
technical, and social systems that are thought to follow power laws
over at least some part of their range. His diverse examples
include intensities of wars (Roberts and Turcotte 1998), mag-
nitude of earthquakes (National Geophysical Data Center 2010),
citations of scien- tific papers (Redner 1998), and web hits
(Adamic and Huberman 2000). Newman (2005) specifically excludes
fire size distributions, while admitting that they might follow
power laws over portions of their ranges. Current opinion is
divided among those who would globally assign power laws to
fire-size distributions (Minnich 1983; Bak et al. 1990; Malamud et
al. 1998, 2005; Turcotte et al. 2002; Ricotta 2003) and those who
would attribute them only to portions of distributions or rule them
out altogether in favor of alternatives (Cumming 2001; Reed and
McKelvey 2002; Clauset et al. 2007; Chap. 3).
2.4 Scaling Laws and Fire Regimes
Wildfires affect ecosystems across a range of scales in space and
time, and controls on fire regimes change across scales. The
attributes of individual fires are spatially and temporally
variable, and the concept of fire regimes has evolved to
characterize aggregate properties such as frequency, severity,
seasonality, or area affected per unit time. These aggregate
properties are often reduced to metrics such as means and
variances, thereby simplifying much of the complexity of fire by
focusing on a single scale and obscuring ecologically important
cross-scale interactions (Falk et al. 2007).
Scaling laws can deconstruct aggregate statistics of fire regimes
in two ways: via frequency distributions that exhibit scaling laws,
or by examining the scale depen- dence of individual metrics.
Fire-size distributions are an example of the first, in that
frequency distributions of fire sizes often follow power laws over
at least portions of their ranges (Malamud et al. 1998, 2005;
Turcotte et al. 2002; Moritz et al. 2005; Millington et al. 2006).
Fire frequency, fire hazard, and spatial patterns of fire occur-
rence in fire history data are examples of the second, in that
these statistics often change systematically and predictably across
the spatial scale of measurement (Moritz 2003; McKenzie et al.
2006a; Falk et al. 2007; Kellogg et al. 2008). Here we briefly
discuss both the scaling patterns that have been found within each
of these
312 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
four metrics of fire regimes (size, frequency, hazard, spatial
pattern) and the more problematic attribution of mechanisms
responsible for the scaling patterns.
2.4.1 Fire Size Distributions
Power laws have been statistically fit to fire size distributions
from simulation mod- els and empirical data at many scales, from
virtual raster landscapes generated by the “Forest Fire Model” (Bak
et al. 1990) to historical wildfire sizes throughout the
continental United States (Malamud et al. 2005). Not all scaling
relationships found in fire-size distributions are power laws. For
example, Cumming (2001) found that a truncated exponential
distribution, which defines an upper bound to fire size, had the
best fit to data from boreal mixedwood forests in Canada. Reed and
McKelvey (2002) suggest that the power law serves as an appropriate
null model, but that additional parameters in a “competing hazards”
model improved the fit to empirical data at regional scales.
Ricotta (2003) suggests that power law exponents can change with
spatial scale, based on hierarchical fractal properties of
landscapes, providing a rejoinder to detractors of the power-law
paradigm. An excellent review of this topic, with discussion, is
found in Millington et al. (2006). These authors state, and we
concur, that the value of discerning power-law behavior, or
alterna- tive, more complex nonlinear functions, would increase
greatly if the ecological mechanisms driving such behavior could be
identified (West et al. 1997; Brown et al. 2002).
Two mechanisms in particular have been proposed to explain
power-law behavior in fire-size distributions. Self-organized
criticality (SOC—Bak et al. 1988) refers to an emergent state of
natural phenomena whereby a system (be it physical, biological, or
socioeconomic) evolves to a state of equilibrium charac- terized by
variable event sizes, each of which resets the system in proportion
to event magnitude. In theory, the frequency distribution of events
will approach a power law because the recovery time from
“resetting” varies with event magnitude. SOC has been associated
mainly with physical systems, particularly natural hazards such as
earthquakes and landslides (Cello and Malamud 2006), but its
attribution to power laws in fire regimes has typically been only
at small scales (Malamud et al. 1998) or inferred from small-scale
behavior (Song et al. 2001).
In contrast to SOC, highly optimized tolerance (HOT) emphasizes
structured internal configurations of systems that involve
tradeoffs in robustness (Carlson and Doyle 2002; Moritz et al.
2005), rather than the emergent outcomes of stochastic though
correlated events as in SOC. For example, a HOT model that can be
applied to wildfires is the probability-loss ratio (PLR) model
(Doyle and Carlson 2000; Moritz et al. 2005), a probabilistic model
of tradeoffs between resources (e.g., some ecosystem function in
natural systems or efforts to protect timber in managed sys- tems)
and losses (e.g., from fire). Solving the PLR model analytically
produces a
32 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
frequency distribution of expected fire sizes that follows a power
law (Moritz et al. 2005). HOT provides a theoretical framework for
examining ecosystem resilience in response to fire events (Chap.
3).
2.4.2 Fire Frequency
The terms fire frequency and fire-return interval (FRI) are part of
the currency of ecosystem management. Fire frequency is often
compared among different geo- graphic regions and between the
current and historical periods. For example, con- siderable FRI
data exist across the western United States (NOAA 2010), which can
be compared and used to build regional models of fire frequency
(McKenzie et al. 2000). Both comparisons and model-building assume
that all FRI data points rep- resent a composite fire return
interval (CFRI)––the average time between fires that are observed
within a sample area, but the likelihood of detecting a fire event
clearly increases as the search area is expanded. FRIs are
inherently scale-dependent, despite sophisticated methods for
unbiased estimation of fire-free intervals (Reed and Johnson
2004).
Scaling laws in fire frequency thus quantify the relationship
between the area examined for evidence of fire and the estimated
fire return interval. This interval- area relationship (IA––Falk et
al. 2007) appears in low-severity fire regimes pro- ducing
fire-scars on surviving trees, mixed-severity fire regimes where
fire perimeters are estimated, and raster simulation models that
produce a range of fire severities and fire sizes (Falk 2004;
McKenzie et al. 2006a; Falk et al. 2007). In each case, the IA can
be fit to a power law, whose slope (exponent) captures other
aggregate properties of the fire regime (Fig. 2.1). For example,
larger mean fire sizes produce less negative slopes, because
small-area samples are more likely to detect large fires than small
fires. Simulations suggest that greater variance in fire size,
given equal means, also produces less negative slopes, for reasons
that are presently unclear (see Falk et al. 2007 for
details).
In theory, then, the intercept in log-log space of the IA
relationship reflects the mean point fire-return interval (sample
area = 0 in the case of a point, or the area of the minimum mapping
unit otherwise), providing a “location” parameter to the scaling
law (Falk et al. 2007). Also in theory, the exponents in the IA
relationship could be derived from the properties of fire-size
distributions, possibly means and variances alone, although extreme
values (rare large fires) make this difficult. This connection to
fire size is useful because predictive modeling of fire sizes,
though subject to substantial uncertainty, is less problematic than
predicting fire frequency (McKenzie et al. 2000; Littell et al.
2009). Further work is necessary, though, to connect the IA
relationship to estimates of fire sizes, or fire-size
distributions.
Another metric of fire frequency, the fire cycle, or natural fire
rotation, refers, on a particular landscape, to the time it takes
to burn an area equal to that landscape. The fire cycle is
presumably independent of spatial scale if the sample landscape is
much larger than the largest fire recorded within it (Agee 1993),
but calculating it
332 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
depends on accurate estimates of the sizes of every fire in the
sample. This is a difficult task in historical low-severity fire
regimes, in which most fire-frequency work has been done (Hessl et
al. 2007; Chap. 7). Furthermore, Reed (2006) showed that the
mathematical equivalence between the fire cycle and the mean point
FRI only holds if all fires are the same size, limiting the
usefulness of the fire cycle as a metric of fire frequency.
2.4.3 Fire Hazard
Fire hazard in fire-history research quantifies the instantaneous
probability of fire, and is derivable from distribution functions
of the exponential family (e.g., negative exponential and Weibull)
associated with the fire cycle (stand-replacing fire— Johnson and
Gutsell 1994) and the distribution of fire-free intervals
(fire-scar records—McKenzie et al. 2006a). The hazard function may
be constant over time, reflecting a memory-free system in which
current events do not depend on past events, and producing
exponential age class distributions of patches in stand- replacing
fire regimes (Johnson and Gutsell 1994). In contrast, an increasing
hazard of fire over time (or decreasing, but this is rarely seen in
fire regimes) reflects a causative factor, i.e. the growth of
vegetation and buildup of fuel that facilitates fire spread. This
increasing hazard is represented mathematically by a shape
parameter in the Weibull distribution that is significantly greater
than 1 (if this parameter is 1 the distribution reduces to the
negative exponential––Evans et al. 2000). Moritz (2003) observes,
however, that the ecological significance of the shape
parameter
Fig. 2.1 Interval-area (IA) relationships (power laws) in log-log
space for two watersheds in eastern Washington. WMPI = Weibull
median probability interval. The more negative slope in Swauk Creek
is a result of smaller fire sizes and more frequent fire occurrence
than in Quartzite. Quartzite displays a minor but noticeable
(concave down) departure from linearity (Redrawn and rescaled from
McKenzie et al. (2006a))
34 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
covaries with the scale parameter, representing, with fire, the
mean fire-free interval. For long fire-free intervals, shape
parameters £ 2 represent fire hazard that increases negligibly over
time (Moritz 2003).
When the hazard function changes with spatial scale, it reflects
changing con- trols on fire occurrence. McKenzie et al. (2006a) and
Moritz (2003) identified pat- terns in hazard functions that were
associated with the relative strength of transient controls on fire
occurrence and fire spread. In low-severity fire regimes in dry
for- ests of eastern Washington state, USA, McKenzie et al. (2006a)
sampled composite fire records at different spatial scales to
examine the scale dependence of fire fre- quency and fire hazard.
At small sampling scales, hazard functions were signifi- cantly
greater than 1 (increasing hazard over time), particularly in
watersheds with complex topography, but declined monotonically with
increasing sampling scale (Fig. 2.2). McKenzie et al. (2006a)
suggest that fire hazard on eastern Washington landscapes increases
over time at spatial scales associated with a characteristic size
of historical fires, reflecting the effects of fuel buildup within
burned areas.
In high-severity fire regimes of shrublands in southern California,
USA, Moritz (2003) found no scale dependence in the hazard function
except for one landscape whose location and topography protected it
from extreme fire weather (Fig. 2.3). Fire hazard increased in
response to the increasing flammability of fuels over time. Over
most of the region, however, fuel age-classes burned with equal
likelihood, because almost all large fires occurred during extreme
fire weather, providing suf- ficient inertia to overcome the
patchiness of fuels and rendering the hazard function essentially
constant. In both these examples, then, scaling laws in fire hazard
were
Fig 2.2 The Weibull shape parameter decreases with scale of
sampling in two watersheds in eastern Washington. WMPI = Weibull
median probability interval. Horizontal line marks the value (1.6)
at the 95% upper confidence bound for testing whether the parameter
is different from 1.0—meaning no increasing hazard over time. Fires
were larger and less frequent in Quartzite than in Swauk Creek, so
a shape parameter significantly greater than 1.0 may still be
negligible eco- logically, because shape and scale parameters
co-vary (Moritz 2003 and Fig. 2.3) (Redrawn from McKenzie et al.
(2006a))
352 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
apparent only when controls were “bottom-up” (Kellogg et al. 2008,
Chaps. 1 and 3), i.e., produced by interactions between fine-scale
process (the buildup of fuels over time) and landscape pattern
(topography and the spatial variability in fuel loadings), and
where extreme fire weather was uncommon.
2.4.4 Correlated Spatial Patterns
We emphasized earlier that a key property of landscape fire is
contagion. The rela- tive connectivity of landscapes with respect
to fire spread and the momentum pro- vided by fire intensity and
fire weather jointly affect the probability that two locations will
experience the same fire event. If this probability attenuates
system- atically with distance, it can in theory be represented by
a scaling law related to contagion.
The cumulative effect of these probabilities over time can be seen
clearly as the similarity between two locations of the time series
of years recording fire. In low- severity fire regimes, this
similarity is measured between two recorder trees (point fire
records) or area samples (composite fire records). Kellogg et al.
(2008) com- piled these time series for every recorder tree in each
of seven watersheds in Washington state, USA. They used a classical
ecological distance measure, the Jaccard distance (closely related
to the Sørensen’s distance [see below]––Legendre
Fig. 2.3 Hazard function scale and shape parameters sampled at
different scales in high-severity fire regimes in shrublands of
southern California. The single point in the upper right represents
one sample at the finest spatial scale that was protected from
extreme fire weather and shows significantly increasing hazard over
time. The positive covariance of the two parameters widens
confidence intervals on significance tests of the shape parameter’s
difference from 1.0, sensu McKenzie et al. (2006a) and Moritz
(2003), such that even values » 2.0 may not indicate increas- ing
fire hazard with time (Redrawn from Moritz (2003))
36 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
and Legendre 1998), to compare pairs of recorder trees at different
geographic distances, generating scatterplots analogous to
empirical variograms (hereafter SD variograms). Spherical variogram
models, and power-law functions, were fit to these aggregate data
for each watershed (McKenzie et al. 2006b; Kellogg et al. 2008; and
the example below). Both types of models had better explanatory
power in more topographically complex watersheds.
2.4.5 Mechanisms
Power laws abound in nature and society, but to date explicit
mechanisms that produce them, and the parameters associated with
their variability, have been dif- ficult to identify. Purely
stochastic processes can produce power laws (Reed 2001; Brown et
al. 2002; Solow 2005), as can general dimensional relationships
among variables, the most familiar being Euclidean geometric
scaling (Brown et al. 2002). Brown et al. (2002) suggest that when
scaling exponents in power laws (a in Eq. 2.1) take on a limited or
unexpected range of values they are more likely to have arisen from
underlying mechanisms. Examples of this are in organismic biology,
where the fractal structure of networks and exchange surfaces
clearly leads to allometric relationships (West et al. 1997, 1999,
2002) and in ecosystems in which there are strong feedbacks between
biotic and hydrologic processes (Scanlon et al. 2007; Sole
2007).
How might we identify the mechanisms behind scaling laws in fire
regimes? We propose two general criteria, based on our overview
above, as hypotheses to be tested. Criterion #1 suggests how
mechanisms produce scaling laws, whereas crite- rion #2 provides
necessary conditions for scaling laws in fire regimes to be linked
to driving mechanisms.
Fig. 2.4 Scaling laws in fire regimes are expected when bottom-up
controls predominate and they interact strongly with landscape
elements. For the contagious process of fire, fine-scale mecha-
nisms provide momentum and topography and spatial pattern of fuels
control connectivity (see text for discussion of contagion). In
contrast, top-down controls (climate) increase fire size and
therefore fire synchrony on landscapes where they are dominant,
e.g., with gentle topography or continuous fuels. This favors
irregular frequency distributions and lessens the scale dependence
of fire frequency, hazard functions, and spatial patterns
372 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
1. Bottom-up controls are in effect: Drawing on O’Neill et al.
(1986), we propose a hierarchical view of fire regimes that focuses
interest on landscape scales (Fig. 2.4). Mechanisms at a finer
scale below drive fire propagation, and interac- tions between
process (fire spread) and pattern (topography and fuels) generate
complex spatial patterns. When landscape spatial complexity is
sufficient, fire spread and fuel consumption produce the spatial
patterns that are reflected in the IA relationship, the hazard
function, and the SD variogram. Conversely to one paradigm of
complexity theory that posits that simple generating rules can
produce complex observable behavior, we therefore see that
relatively simple aggregate properties of natural
phenomena––scaling laws––are the result of complex interactions
among driving mechanisms.
2. Contagion provides a linkage among observations: We submit that
if events (fires) are separated by more distance in space or time
than some limit of conta- gion, observed scaling laws cannot be
reasonably linked to a driving mechanism. Mechanism requires
“entanglement” (as in the quantum-mechanical sense). For example,
both SOC and HOT, mentioned above, require that events within a
domain influence each other, whether one event resets system
properties in proportion to its magnitude (SOC) or multiple events
interact as they propagate through a system (HOT). The range limit
of contagion clearly changes as a func- tion of variation in
fine-scale drivers. As we said earlier (see also Chap. 1),
increasing energy (momentum) effectively increases connectivity,
e.g., when extreme fire weather overcomes barriers to fire spread
that are associated with landscape heterogeneity (Turner and Romme
1994).
Criterion #2 does not preclude some mechanism for power-law
behavior across continental-to-global scales; it just limits the
hierarchical interpretation in criterion #1 to spatial scales at
which contagion occurs. Other explanations for power laws in nature
and society do exist, however, including the purely mathematical
(Reed 2001; Solow 2005).
2.5 Example: Power Laws and Spatial Patterns in Low-Severity Fire
Regimes
We now turn to an example, briefly alluded to above, from
low-severity fire regimes of eastern Washington state, USA (Everett
et al. 2000; Hessl et al. 2004, 2007; McKenzie et al. 2006a;
Kellogg et al. 2008; Kennedy and McKenzie 2010). Detailed
fire-history data were collected in seven watersheds east of the
Cascade crest, along a southwest–northeast gradient (Fig. 2.5). In
contrast to most fire his- tory studies, exact locations of all
recorder trees were identified, creating an unprecedented
opportunity for fine-scale spatial analysis (McKenzie et al. 2006a;
Hessl et al. 2007; Kellogg et al. 2008). For a detailed description
of the data and methods, see Everett et al. (2000) or Hessl et al.
(2004).
392 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
Fig. 2.5 Fire history study sites, east of the crest of the Cascade
Mountains, Washington, USA. (a) Watershed locations. (b) Inserts
that display hill shaded topography with dots representing the
locations of recorder trees
40 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
Kellogg et al. (2008) fit the aforementioned empirical SD
variograms to spherical models, in keeping with standard practice
in geostatistics (Rossi et al. 1992), which uses variograms chiefly
for spatial interpolation. Interpolation is generally only feasible
with spherical, exponential, or Gaussian variogram mod- els, due to
certain mathematical conveniences (Isaaks and Srivastava 1989), but
the spherical model in particular is a rather cumbersome artifact,
with two sepa- rate equations applying to observations within or
beyond the range (Kellogg et al. 2008). McKenzie et al. (2006b)
examined the same empirical variograms in double logarithmic space
and found that for some watersheds, the variograms seemed linear or
nearly so, both graphically and when fit with linear regression.
This suggested that power laws govern the correlated spatial
pattern of fire histo- ries. The observed pattern in these
variograms was consistent across varying distance lags used to
construct the variogram. We seek to test the hypothesis in
criterion #1 (above) by trying to replicate the power-law behavior
by controlling fine-scale processes (bottom-up control), using a
neutral landscape model (Gardner and Urban 2007).
2.5.1 Neutral Model for Fire History
McKenzie et al. (2006a) developed a simple neutral fire history
model to simulate recorder trees on landscapes that are scarred by
fires of different sizes and frequen- cies. The purpose of the
neutral model is to separate intrinsic stochastic processes from
the effects of climate, fuel loadings, topography and management.
We have enhanced the model to spread fires probabilistically on
raster landscapes (Kennedy and McKenzie 2010; Fig. 2.6). The raster
model produces 200-year fire histories on a neutral landscape, with
homogenous topography and fuels. The raster landscape is
initialized with a spatial point pattern of recorder trees; this
pattern is simulated as a Poisson pattern of complete spatial
randomness (CSR—Diggle 2003). A mean fire return interval (m
fri ) is specified for the whole “landscape”, yielding a
random
number of fires (n fire
), drawn from a negative exponential distribution, within the
200-year fire history. For each fire, a random fire size is drawn
from a gamma prob- ability distribution (Evans et al. 2000) with
the scale and shape parameters adjusted to produce a specified mean
fire size (m
size ). For each fire in the fire history, an igni-
tion point (pixel) is randomly assigned and the fire is spread
until it reaches the randomly drawn fire size (i.e., area), or
until all tests for fire spread fail in a given iteration. When a
pixel is burned, each of the four immediate neighbors that are not
yet burned is tested for fire spread against the spread probability
(p
burn ). After the
neighbors are tested for fire spread, the burned pixel can no
longer spread fire. In a given fire, if a pixel is burned, then all
trees located in that pixel are tested
independently for scarring in the same time step. This is a simple
probability test, with a specified scar probability (p
scar ) that is uniform across all trees. This neutral
model was produced in particular to evaluate whether the pattern in
the observed SD variogram could be replicated by a simple
stochastic model of fire spread, and
412 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
to explain what differentiates variograms that appear linear in
log-log space from those that do not. In order to satisfy the
second goal, we considered whether the value of Sørensen’s distance
between two trees could be predicted by features of the neutral
model.
2.5.2 Prediction of Sørensen’s Distance
The Sørensen’s distance can be analytically derived from
conditional probabilities associated with fire spread and the
scarring of recorder trees. Within the context of this neutral
model, and under several assumptions verified by simulation,
Kennedy and McKenzie (2010) found that the Sørensen’s distance (SD)
for a pair of trees a given distance apart is predicted by two
features of the neutral model. The first is the probability a tree
in a burned pixel is scarred (p
scar , which is spa-
tially independent), which in the neutral model is constant across
all recorder trees in the simulated landscape. The second model
feature is the probability that two trees
Fig. 2.6 Fire spread for (a) p burn
= 0.75 and (c) p burn
=0.50. A complete spatial randomness (CSR) process generates
recorder trees (points), with trees scarred by associated fire
(black-filled points in b and d). A higher p
burn yields a more regular fire shape, although the difference in
fire shape is
difficult to discern visually in the scar pattern
42 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
are both in a burned pixel in a given fire year (but not
necessarily the same burned pixel). Specifically, for the pair of
trees A and B, we calculate the probability that tree B is in a
burned pixel (B
fire ) given that tree A is in a burned pixel (P(B
fire |A
fire )).
For the stochastic model we consider the expected value of SD, and
we found that it is predicted by (Kennedy and McKenzie 2010)
( ) ( )* 1 |fire fire scarE SD P B A p= − (2.2)
The probability the second tree is in a burned pixel given the
first is in a burned pixel is not constant across pairs of trees,
as it depends on the distance between the two trees, the fire size,
and fire shape (Fig. 2.7).
As the distance between two trees approaches 0, then the
conditional probability the second is in the fire given that the
first is (P(B
fire |A
reduces to
(2.3)
Fig. 2.7 Verification of the derivation of E(SD) via simulation and
nonlinear regression. (a) P(B
fire |A
fire ) with distance (d) predicted by 3-parameter model (neutral
model m
size =0.15 = 1500
|A fire
) { }0 1 2 , ,b b b , with the p
scar set in the simulation (=0.5), used to predict
E(SD) and compared to calculated SD variogram from the same
simulation (i.e., Eq. 2.5). It fits well. (c) The relationship of
P(B
fire |A
size ) and fire
shape as modified by the burn probability (p burn
); (d) these differences are also shown in changes to the shape of
the SD variogram
432 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
Therefore, one can estimate the p scar
from an empirical SD variogram by the mean SD at the smallest
distance bin. Simulations confirmed that the value of p
scar
would be ³ the mean value at the smallest distance bin. We used a
least-squares nonlinear regression algorithm in the R statistical
pro-
gram (nls; R Foundation 2003) to fit simulated P(B fire
|A fire
) against distance (up to half the maximum distance between
simulated recorder trees––the same criterion used to evaluate SD),
for three candidate functions (Kennedy and McKenzie 2010). The best
fit with respect to an information–theoretic criterion (AIC) was
found with a three-parameter function:
( ) 2 0 1| b
and, therefore,
The coefficients {b 0 , b
1 , b
fire |A
fire ) with dis-
tance, and consequently the change in SD with distance. The
estimates of b 0 , b
1 and
b 2 in the neutral model change with increasing fire size, in a
manner that depends on
the shape of the fire (Fig. 2.7). Fire shape is closely associated
with p burn
, with lower values of p
burn producing more irregular and complex shapes (Fig. 2.6). As the
fire
becomes larger and more regular, then the relationship between P(B
fire
|A fire
0 and slope − b
2 gets closer to 1
(Fig. 2.7c; Table 2.1), and the slope (b 1 ) becomes less negative.
In contrast, for irregu-
larly shaped fires characteristic of p burn
= 0.5, the decline of P(B fire
|A fire
) remains non- linear with estimates of b
2 well below 1 across a range of values for m
size (Fig. 2.7c).
scar , a power law describes the SD variogram, because
we have:
scarE SD p b d= (2.6)
which is the power-law relationship presented in Eq. 2.1. Recall
that the relationship P(B
fire |A
scar , and values of
size . It is therefore possible to calibrate the values
Table 2.1 Parameter estimates for neutral model results with
varying m size
(0.07, 0.20) and p
burn (0.5, 0.75), and for the observed variograms (Twentymile,
Swauk). Note that the
coefficients b 1 are all negative, also indicated, for clarity, by
the minus sign in Eq. 3.4
b 0
b 1
b 2
m size
m size
Twentymile p scar
scar 0.689 1.492 −0.2270 0.195
44 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
of m size
scar arbitrarily close to 1, and thus manipulate
simulated results to produce a power-law relationship in the SD
variogram. In the neutral model this is a consequence of the
mathematical relationships that we have found, yet the exercise of
calibrating the parameters reveals under what conditions, as
represented by m
size , p
scar , power laws should be expected.
These can then be compared to the patterns observed in real
landscapes, and indicate the ecological conditions under which
power laws are produced.
The challenge, then, is to evaluate the relevance of the neutral
model results for real landscapes insofar as the derived
mathematical relationships are able to predict the patterns
observed. We fit Eqs. 2.3, 2.5, and 2.6 to the SD variograms of
real landscapes on a gradient of topographic complexity; first we
estimate p
scar as the
mean SD at the smallest distance bin in the observed SD variogram,
then we fit Eq. 2.5 to the variogram in order to estimate the
coefficients {b
0 , b
1 , b
2 }. Here we
compare the two watersheds from Kellogg et al. (2008) that are at
opposite ends of this topographic gradient: Twentymile (least
complex) and Swauk Creek (most complex). Coefficient estimates are
in Table 2.1, and Fig. 2.8 shows the contrasting fits of the SD
variograms from Twentymile and Swauk Creek in log-log space.
Fig. 2.8 Observed SD variograms for the least (Twentymile; a,b) and
most (Swauk; c,d) topo- graphically complex sites. Swauk increases
more rapidly at smaller distances, and reaches a higher value. The
Swauk fit is almost indistinguishable from the power-law
prediction, with a small separation at the lowest distance
bins
452 Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
Clearly the relationship for Swauk Creek follows a power law (b 0 *
p
scar = 1.492 *
0.689 = 1.028 » 1; Eq. 2.6), whereas Twentymile does not (0.7 *
0.979 = 0.685). These results suggest preliminary support for the
hypothesis associated with
Criterion #1 (above): Topographic complexity provides a bottom-up
control on the spatial patterns of low-severity fire, producing
relatively small fires and irregular fire shapes (SD increases more
rapidly with distance, and reaches a higher peak, in Swauk Creek
than Twentymile; Fig. 2.7). Neutral model runs with p
burn = 0.5 (irreg-
ular fire shapes; Fig. 2.6a) and relatively small mean fire sizes
produced coefficient estimates similar to Swauk ({b
0 , b
1 , b
lowed power laws with p scar
near that estimated for Swauk. In contrast, neutral model runs with
p
burn = 0.75 (regular fire shapes; Fig. 2.6c) and larger mean
fire
sizes produced coefficient estimates and SD variograms similar to
those from Twentymile (Table 2.1).
What do we gain, then, by deconstructing these scaling laws via
simulation; e.g., can we back-engineer a meaningful, preferably
quantitative, description of fire regime properties that is
relevant for landscape ecology and fire management? Certain
combinations of the probability of scarring, the probability that a
cell burns given that a neighboring cell has burned, and the mean
fire size produce power-law behavior in an aggregate measure––the
SD variogram––that represents the spatial autocorrelation structure
of fire occurrence. For example, a low probability of scar- ring
suggests variable fire severity at fine scales. A moderate
likelihood of a cell’s burning given that its neighbor has burned
(i.e., p
burn = 0.5) suggest fine-scale con-
trols on fire spread (topography and spatial heterogeneity of
fuels). Mixed-severity fires subject to fine-scale landscape
controls over time (decades to centuries) engender complex patterns
that nonetheless produce simple mathematical struc- tures (power
laws). Further simulation modeling such as we describe here should
illuminate what additional structures and scaling relationships can
arise from the universe of complex interactions between the
contagious process of fire and land- scape controls.
2.6 Conclusions and Implications
Scaling laws in fire regimes are one aggregate representation of
landscape controls on fire. Cross-scale patterns can reflect
landscape memory (Peterson 2002). For example, fire-size
distributions on landscapes small enough for fires to interact hold
a memory of previous fires (Malamud et al. 1998; Collins et al.
2009), as do shape parameters of the hazard function on landscapes
in which fuel buildup is necessary to sustain fire spread (Moritz
2003; McKenzie et al. 2006a). Scaling laws in our SD variograms
hold a memory of all historical fires registered by recorder trees.
We have conjectured above that scaling laws arise when bottom-up
controls are in effect, but an additional possibility is that
scaling relationships may be non-stationary over time, reflecting
changes or anomalies in top-down controls, specifically climate
(Falk et al. 2007). Mean fire size, fire frequency, and fire
severity change
46 D. McKenzie and M.C. Kennedy
with changes in climate and land use (Hessl et al. 2004; Hessburg
and Agee 2005; Littell et al. 2009). A rapidly changing climate may
at least change the parameters of scaling relationships, such as
exponents in power laws derived from frequency distributions, and
at most make them disappear altogether. Such behavior could
indicate that a fire-prone landscape had crossed an important
threshold (Pascual and Guichard 2005), with implications for
ecosystem dynamics and management.
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Chapter 2: Scaling Laws and Complexity in Fire Regimes
2.1 Introduction
2.3 Extrapolating Across Scales
2.4.1 Fire Size Distributions
2.4.5 Mechanisms
2.5 Example: Power Laws and Spatial Patterns in Low-Severity Fire
Regimes
2.5.1 Neutral Model for Fire History
2.5.2 Prediction of Sørensen’s Distance
2.6 Conclusions and Implications